I had to complete some paperwork for an employee of ours for the Social Security Administration. I got this old bitch on the phone talking two words a minute about how this is the third time she sent paperwork and we haven’t written back. I asked if she could email me a copy of the document so I could complete it right away. She yells NO - its not secure! It HAS to be a fax. I replied in that case she should just try mailing it. NO! It has to be right now! It’s already late.
I was so tempted to give her our fax number with one digit incorrect and when I never got it I’d go UGH! Did you say 1234? It’s 1235! Oh no! Next time just chisel it on a stone tablet and send it over by horse you fucking dino. If you don’t know how to email something fine but don’t play it off as email not being secure.
Funny, the last time I had to fax a document was about 4 years ago to the Canadian Revenue Agency. (Think IRS) They didn’t accept email either. Not sure if they’ve entered the 1990s by now or not.
Try figuring out how to fax something on an MPF printer. Do I dial 9 to get out? Do I have to dial 1 before hand? Is there a transmission receipt? Is the paper oriented correctly? Jeesh.
Do you have any idea how the SMTP protocol works? It’s a lot like writing a love letter to Susie during math class and handing it to the kid in front of you to pass to the kid in front of him until it gets to her. You’re not even sure who it will get handed to at the time you send it, and you’re entirely sure what they do with it.
Probably 99.9% of the time, this actually works out OK - most servers are trustworthy and if they keep a copy of your e-mail, it’s only because it was queued up while they were making their backups. But I think it’s very unwise to send information like a social security number that way.
At least with a fax, you have a single point-to-point connection and it’d take a wire tap to intercept it. (Heck, the IRS has even implemented a new warning: if other people have physical access to your fax machine, the fax might not be secure. Are you sure you want to go ahead and fax?)
Many people seem to think that fax technology is archaic, it is still the standard in communicating with the government precisely because of security issues. Imagine the pitting that would go on if the SSA lost even a single number because they e-mailed it.
As commonly used, faxing is more secure than e-mail. You can encrypt e-mail, but there’s no standard, easy way to do so. You and the recipient have to agree on the method of encryption, and use a third-party program to do so. A fax is a direct connection to the recipient.
People complain about the government red tape, some of it deserved, but in general they tend to be better at protecting private information than private businesses have been.
The misunderstanding is that when a govt worker says “secure”, they don’t mean resistant to attack, they mean blessed under whatever regulatory authority, as enshrined in law as bearing the magical label “secure”.
When the regulations were being formulated, fax was already well enshrined and there didn’t seem to be any huge problems with it and it would be a pain in the ass to switch so it got blessed as an officially sanctioned secure communication channel. When the same regulators got around to looking at email, there existed a version of email, using encryption and digital signatures that was billed as secure so that version of email got the magical regulatory blessing and plain old normal email was billed as “insecure”. The problem is, secure email is such a pain in the ass to set up that essentially nobody has it so nobody bothers to do anything with it. That’s how we got into the situation we are in today.
It’s pointless trying to compare the actual security of email to the actual security of faxes because that never was relevant in any of this.
I’m a director in a medical clinic, and the medical records department is part of my purview. Faxes are the bane of my fucking existence. We spent $$$ getting a secure email system that meets government standards, and it certainly helps, but only when working with large, wealthy, tech-savvy other facilities or young, tech-savvy patients. When we’re dealing with a tiny eye doctor’s office in a strip mall in Bumfuck, Utah, or a 75-year old patient who calls us from her land line, we’re still chained to faxes.
I’ve had to send various intimate financial documents to my lender for a refi lately, and I’ve been faxing them from work rather than scanning and emailing, because I don’t want electronic copies of those documents archived on my agency’s servers.
Imagine if the government got its hands on my tax returns, for instance.
It misses the point by talking about ideal circumstances. Ideally a fax is secure. Ideally an email is secure. Realistically a fax could easily be sent anywhere by having one digit of the telephone number incorrect.
My ire was directed at her insistence upon using archaic technology because it was more secure when in reality it offers no more security than email - she just simply doesn’t understand how emails work.
I work for a government health agency and we’re not allowed to send confidential information or credit card data by “regular” email OR fax.
We can send by email if we establish a secure encrypted link with the other party. Fax, fuggetaboutit. We can send by US mail, by courier, or by speaking the information over the phone.
I have to book hotel rooms for our staff on occasion. A lot of hotels insist on a credit card “authorization form” if the card won’t actually be physically present at the hotel during check in. The form requires my signature and a card number. They have to fax me a form, which I sign and fax back, and then I call them and tell them the number over the phone, which they then fill out onto the signed form.